What types of certificate stores do I have on my Windows 7 system?
What is "Personal" certificate store is for?

✍: FYIcenter.com

A

If you start the "certmgr.msc" Management Console on your Windows 7 system,
you probably will see this list of certificate stores:

Personal - Contains certificates associated with private keys
to which you have access. These are the certificates that have been
issued to you, or to the computer or service for which you?re managing certificates.
You can use your personal certificate to sign outgoing emails or log into Web sites.

Enterprise Trust - Contains CTLs (Certificate Trust Lists).
A certificate trust list provides a mechanism for trusting self-signed
root certificates from other organizations and limiting the purposes
for which these certificates are trusted.

Trusted People - Contains certificates issued to people or end entities
that are explicitly trusted. Most often these are self-signed certificates
or certificates explicitly trusted in an application such as Microsoft Outlook.

Other People - Contains certificates issued to people or end entities
that are implicitly trusted.
These certificates must be part of a trusted certification hierarchy.
Most often these are cached certificates for services like Encrypting File System (EFS),
where certificates are used for creating authorization for decrypting an encrypted file.